ZGC: More Su Dai

[ximen]

When satyreyes posted his excellent update to the story about yoking oxen and horses, I showed it to my professor, who said, "Not bad. How about the mussel and the snipe?" So here it is.

Important stuff:
-Zhao, a largish warring state to the north
-Yue, a minor warring state to the southeast. It was conquered early on by Chu.
-Su Dai, a persuader on behalf of Yue. Last seen yesterday, bribing Qun Yukun.
-the Yi River, a river
-Qin, a large warring state to the west. A country of tigers and wolves. Eventually conquered all the warring states and unified China.

Zhao was about to strike at Yue, so Su Dai addressed the king of Zhao on Yue's behalf, saying, "Now I have come, across the Yi River. A mussel was sunning itself, when a snipe pecked at its meat. The mussel closed, pinching the snipe's beak. The snipe said, 'Today it will not rain, tomorrow it will not rain, and just like this there will be a dead mussel.' The mussel for its part said, 'Today I will not let go, tomorrow I will not let go, and just like this there will be a dead snipe.' The two were not willing to release each other, and a fisherman came and took them both. Now Zhao is about to strike at Yue. Zhao and Yue have long been at a standoff, exhausting their people. I fear that the strong Qin will be our fisherman. Thus I wish that your majesty would think about this carefully." The king said, "good," and thus stopped.

edit: fixed the note about Yue. It's a minor state, not a small one.

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Yue is actually quite a large state, it's just politically marginal because the rulers are not sinicized and it's located far form the core. But it takes up much of the east coast of China.

[kitsuchan.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks. The map I have doesn't have Yue on it at all, since it's already been swallowed, and the map on wikipedia is unclear. It's fixed now.

[satyreyes.livejournal.com]

The thing about modernizing this one is that the story of the mussel and the snipe is still accessible to modern audiences, unlike yoking horses and oxen together. You would probably use "clam" and "seagull" in deference to modern vocabularies, though.

Modern power distributions would also force a different adaptation of the stories. Occupation by the United Nations would probably have to replace conquest by Qin, since there aren't a lot of complex three-state balance of power situations that the UN isn't watching. Maybe use India and Pakistan in the order of your preference for Zhao and Yue. Hard to see how to work America into this one organically; Iraq isn't a close enough rival to play mussel to our snipe, and we don't have a reason to attack China or the EU at the moment. These days you need a pretext for war. :eyeroll:

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Maybe an economic one?

"If Japan doesn't cooperate with the US, China will swamp us all?"

I dunno.

[summercomfort]

I just wanted to say that I really like your posting of these stories. I've read so many of them in 成语 and 寓言 form, but it's cool to have such fundamental Chinese stories out and about. :D

[kitsuchan.livejournal.com]

Yay!

Yeah, it's fun having people be interested in them. On Friday someone complained about our professor's suggested translation, saying the word was too obscure and asking "how should we translate this for the common people?" The professor just said, "the common people aren't interested in this!" I don't think of my friends as "common people," but other than you and El and Ben, most of us have never heard any of this, and yet we're still interested. So it's good to show that the ZGC really is interesting. They're such fun stories that I want to tell them to people!